themes by way of response: the use of violence by the oppressed and the definition
of those best placed to use violence. The tenor of Fanon’s argument can be judged
by his statement that ‘when the native hears a speech about Western culture he
pulls out the knife––or at least makes sure it is within easy reach’.326 In other
words, Fanon went beyond recommending that violence could be employed for
strategic reasons and insisted upon its value as a means of purification. ‘At the level
of individuals’, he wrote, ‘violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his
inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and
restores his self-respect.’327 Violence, Fanon argued, would do more than ‘songs,
poems, and folklore’ to restore an oppressed people’s national culture.
Concerning the perpetrators of these acts, Fanon took the decisive step not only
of relocating the revolutionary class from the white proletariat in Europe to the
321 Black Skin, White Masks (London, 1970), 13.
322 Ibid. 57.
323 Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (1961).
324 See also Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris, 1961) and Pour la révolution africaine
(1964).
325 The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1971), 48.
326 Ibid. 32.
327 Ibid. 74.
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colonies but of also discounting the native bourgeoisie and the colonized intellec-
tual. Indeed, Fanon discounted all those who had begun to benefit from the
colonial set up. According to Fanon, it was the peasantry who were revolutionary
and this was so because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. As the
‘urban spearhead’ of the revolution, however, Fanon added the lumpen-proletariat,
‘the hopeless dregs of humanity’, the uprooted of the shanty towns. These people,
he wrote, are ‘like a horde of rats; you may kick them and you may throw stones at
them, but despite your efforts they’ll go on gnawing at the roots of the tree’.328
‘Now’, Fanon concluded, ‘the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do
not lay claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are
the truth.’329
Simone de Beauvoir reported that relations with Fanon could often be very
difficult––Fanon, she wrote, ‘could not forget that Sartre was French and he
blamed him for not having expiated that crime sufficiently’330––but it was Sartre
who wrote a long preface for Les Damnés de la terre. What this text demonstrated
was the concordance of their views, for Sartre too believed that colonialism was a
system with its own internal necessities, that it could not be reformed, and that it
infected France herself with racism. It also heralded the emergence of ‘tiers-
mondisme’ as an ideology and of a ‘new left’ which throughout the 1960s focused
its attention upon the liberation struggles taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America and increasingly turned away from what it saw as the obsolete and ossified
communism embodied in the PCF and the USSR. On this view, capitalist imperi-
alism would be defeated in Algiers, Hanoi, or Havana rather than in Paris, London,
or Moscow. Third, Sartre’s preface gave him a further opportunity to condemn
those who deplored the violence used by both sides in the Algerian conflict.
The violence of colonialism, he affirmed, could only be destroyed by violence.
To shoot a European was ‘to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor
and the man he oppresses’.331 Consequently, Sartre had no time for what he
contemptuously dismissed as ‘Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love,
honour, patriotism, and what have you.’332 The abstract universalism of ‘racist
humanitarian’, he concluded, failed to understand that ‘the European has only been
able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters’.333 Among those
Sartre undoubtedly had in mind was his former friend, Albert Camus, born in
Algeria of pied noir parents.
When Albert Camus died in a car accident on his way back to Paris in January
1960 he had effectively fallen into silence.334 The winner of the 1957 Nobel prize
for literature had simply been overwhelmed by events in Algeria and by the
conflicting demands made upon him, in his famous phrase, by the claims of justice
328 The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1971), 103.
329 Ibid. 39.
330 Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 610.
331 Sartre, ‘Preface’ to Fanon, The Wretched, 19.
332 Ibid. 22.
333 Ibid.
334 See Herbert R. Lottman, Camus: A Biography (London, 1979) and Olivier Todd, Albert Camus:
Une vie (1996). See Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French
Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998), 87–135.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
497
and the desire to defend his mother.335 Prior to this, however, he had been bested
in a quarrel with Sartre ostensibly over his essay of 1951, L’Homme révolté.336 The
tale of Camus’s split with Sartre is well known but it merits brief discussion if only
to clarify the political issues that were at stake in post-war France.
By the age of twenty-eight Camus had written three masterpieces: his play,
Caligula; his novel, L’Étranger; and his philosophical essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
Not only did he have these achievements to his name, but by 1943 he had become
editor-in-chief of the leading Resistance newspaper, Combat.337 It was in this same
year that Camus met Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, quickly becoming a member
of their intimate circle of friends. They appeared to have much in common and, not
without some good cause, Camus too was seen as an existentialist. Le Mythe de
Sisyphe, published in 1942, argued that, in a world of the absurd where we could
make no appeal to universal or transcendental values, ‘the one truly philosophical
problem’ was that of suicide. The absurd man, Camus wrote, was ‘he who does
nothing for the eternal’. For all that, the message of Le Mythe de Sisyphe was that
suicide was ‘acceptance pushed to its extreme’ and that it was revolt against the
absurd which restored ‘majesty’ to life. It was for this reason that Camus believed
that Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to ‘futile and hopeless labour’, must be
imagined to be happy.
Yet the differences between Camus and Sartre were not slow to emerge. Although
he had been an active member of the Resistance, Camus became deeply troubled by
the post-Liberation épuration. He (unlike Sartre) campaigned against the execution of
Robert Brasillach. Likewise, whilst he situated himself on the left and was eager to see
the radical reform of post-war France, Camus had no sympathy for the communists
and was not prepared to overlook the crimes and oppression that were taking place
behind the emerging Iron Curtain. In a series of essays entitled ‘Ni victimes ni
bourreaux’, published in Combat at the end of 1946,338 he therefore advocated the
need for a new way of thinking that would be ‘politically modest, freed of all
messianism, and without any no
stalgia for an earthly paradise’. He specifically
denounced the ‘political realism’ endorsed by those who believed that the end
justified the means.
This, however, was precisely what the young philosopher Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, now a member of the Sartre circle, appeared to be doing. In a series of
articles in Les Temps modernes, later to be published under the title of Humanisme et
terreur,339 Merleau-Ponty took issue with Arthur Koestler’s denunciation of the
Moscow show trials and argued they could be justified in terms of the ultimate
victory of communism. Morality, in good Jacobin fashion, was to be subordinated
to the judgement of history. Camus, according to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs,
335 See Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes 1939–1958 (1959).
336 Camus, L’Homme révolté (1951). See Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a
Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended it (Chicago, 2004).
337 See Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (ed), Camus à Combat: Editoriaux et articles d’Albert Camus
1944–1947 (2002).
338 Camus, Actuelles: Chroniques 1944–1948 (1950), 139–79.
339 Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (1947).
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France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
was furious, going so far as to challenge Merleau-Ponty publicly at a party one
evening. For Sartre and his friends, in Beauvoir’s phrase, Merleau-Ponty’s argu-
ment helped them cross the Rubicon: they could now see that moralism was
‘the last bastion of bourgeois idealism’.340 For his part, Camus refused to make a
choice between the Soviet Union and America, believing it possible to find a neutral
course of action. He was, for example, an enthusiastic supporter of Gary Davis, the
American airman who declared himself a citizen of the world. Moreover, as the
Cold War intensified, it was abundantly clear that Camus saw the USSR rather
than the USA as the principal threat to peace and freedom.
Matters came to a head with the publication of Camus’s L’Homme révolté in
1951. This was an immensely impressive, if flawed, work which sought ‘to follow
into the realm of murder and revolt a mode of thinking which began with suicide
and the idea of the absurd’.341 If Camus began his text with a discussion of the
‘metaphysical rebellion’ of the Marquis de Sade––a ‘monstrous form of revenge’,
Camus argued, that could only be assuaged by the creation of a ‘kingdom
of servitude’––his first substantive point was that 1789 had marked ‘the turning
point of modern times’ and that this was so because the revolutionaries had ‘added
to traditional tyrannicide the concept of calculated deicide’.342 Having executed
both the king and God, they then set about the building of a new temple dedicated
to the divinity of the people and it was through this that crime, in the form of state
terrorism, had received its justification. In this way, according to Camus, revolution
became a form of moral nihilism.
As a result, in the twentieth century to act was to murder. There were, Camus
maintained, two political ideologies that had embodied this absurdist position:
Nazism and Marxism. ‘Hitler’, Camus wrote, ‘presents an example which is
perhaps unique in history of a tyrant who has left absolutely no trace of his
activities. For himself, for his people, and for the world, he was nothing but the
epitome of suicide and murder.’343 He represented ‘complete annihilation’. In
terms of Camus’s own trajectory, it might be said that Hitler was a modern-day
Caligula. Yet, Camus asserted, the ‘Fascist mystics’ had had no pretensions to create
a world empire. This, he claimed, was quite definitely not the case with Russian
communism.
Camus’s critique of Marxism was marvellously perceptive. Even though Camus
acknowledged Marx’s good intentions he saw that Marxism as a doctrine could
only lead to ‘the direst consequences’. This was the case because all actions were
permitted as long as they furthered the emergence of the future ‘golden age’. ‘When
good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events’, Camus wrote,
‘nothing is any longer good or bad, but only either premature or out of date.’344
The result, as the Russian Revolution showed, would be dictatorship and rational
terror. ‘By dint of argument, incessant struggle, polemics, excommunications,
persecutions conducted and suffered’, Camus argued. ‘the universal city of free
340 Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 115.
341 L’Homme révolté, 15.
342 Ibid. 143.
343 Ibid. 154.
344 Ibid. 259.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
499
and fraternal man is slowly diverted and gives way to the only universe in which
history and expediency can, in fact, be elevated to the position of judges: the
universe of the trial.’345 The city of man was replaced by the city of ends: injustice
and crime could be justified through the promise of a miracle.
Camus’s difficulties started when he began to sketch out an alternative to such
revolutionary violence and when he tried to establish a realm of ‘limited culpability’
which would enable us to avoid ‘universal murder’. He did so by focusing upon the
act of rebellion rather than that of revolution. ‘Rebellion’, he wrote, ‘though
apparently negative since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals
the part of man which must always be defended.’346 The act of true rebellion came
into operation when we refused to see another human being abused and humiliated
any further. But how were we to prevent this act itself becoming a form of tyranny?
Rebellion after all implied murder. Camus’s answer was that the rebel did not claim
the freedom to commit universal murder. Rather, he accepted that he could only
rebel, if he also accepted the loss of his own life. ‘The rebel’, Camus wrote, ‘has only
one way of reconciling himself with his act of murder if he allows himself to be led
into performing it: to accept his own death and sacrifice.’347 Measure and limit
were indispensable. Somewhat vaguely, Camus ended with a vision of what he
described as Mediterranean moderation.
What followed was a very public and very nasty quarrel between Sartre and
Camus, the details of which can be thankfully passed over. It was, however, to be
a quarrel of long-term significance. Camus had, in fact, written a companion
piece to L’Homme révolté. His play, Les Justes, took as its subject the terrorists of
late nineteenth-century Russia. The same people figured in L’Homme révolté. In
both works they were praised for the moral scrupulousness with which they had
resorted to acts of terror. They stood as a counter-example to the ruthlessness
of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In L’Homme révolté Camus also made favourable
reference to an indigenous tradition of radical activism: the libertarian socialism of
Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. It was with this tradition that his true
sympathies lay.348 Sartre had no liking for such ideas and, as he was to put it in
Les Communistes et la paix, ‘an anti-communist’ was, in his view, ‘a dog’. If he
proved himself only too w
illing to protest about the execution in America of the
convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, he remained silent
about the shooting of workers in communist-controlled East Berlin in the same
year. Nothing was to be done, as he famously remarked, to disillusion the workers
of the Renault car factory at Billancourt outside Paris. What makes this important is
that Sartre was not alone in displaying an unwillingness to condemn Stalinism.
Indeed, if we are to believe Tony Judt, Sartre was broadly representative of a
‘collective myopia’ exhibited by the greater part of the Parisian intelligentsia.349
Camus, in short, not only lost the argument to Sartre but he was also quite definitely
in a minority. According to Judt, the period of Sartrean dominance was characterized
345 Ibid. 296.
346 Ibid. 32.
347 Ibid. 348.
348 See Lou Marin (ed.), Albert Camus et les libertaires (Marseilles, 2008).
349 Judt, Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals 1944–1956 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1992), 246.
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by a network of intellectual practices which had, at its centre, ‘the will and the desire
to believe in communism’.350 Around this article of faith, he argued, was to be found
‘a sort of epistemological double vision’ which made it possible to judge the Soviet
Union and its satellites by criteria not applied elsewhere. To this was added hostility to
the various manifestations of individualism and modernity, often seen in the form of
anti-Americanism. Providing the above with their ‘political and ideological anchor’, to
refer to Judt again, was ‘an indigenous antiliberalism’.
Remarkably, these practices persisted even when the philosophical tide began to
turn against existential Marxism, as it did in the 1960s with the advent of structural-
ism. The anti-Sartrean dimension of structuralism was given dramatic illustration by
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Responding to the publication of the Critique de
la raison dialectique, in the concluding chapter of La Pensée sauvage351 he proclaimed
that ‘I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute but
to dissolve man.’ Sartre’s praxis of the subject, he contended, represented nothing
more than an unscientific subjectivism. Later, in the ‘Finale’ to L’Homme nu,352 Lévi-
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